However, when Socrates and Glaucon agree that the freed prisoner would not want to go back to their state of idealized imprisonment, the allegory veers into op-ed territory. The goodness and justice we thought was inevitable is in fact not guaranteed to occur. As we age and are exposed to many different things in life, we realize that things are not always in accordance with the idealized version of the world we had in our heads as children. The “education” Socrates mentions is our inevitable exposure to reality. In the start, we have a sugarcoated, childlike perception of reality, which is our “natural condition” before “education”. To me, this is an almost accurate description of life, and the process one goes through with the passage of time. The “people” they see are the realities of life. When the prisoners leave the cave, Socrates explains that these are the philosophers who have come to an understanding of what life really is. This is portrayed as an idealized sense of what goodness and justice are. Socrates explains that these prisoners are like unenlightened people who have only an ideal version of reality, which is to say their imagination of how life should be. Once the prisoners climb out of the cave, they are exposed to reality and they see what caused the noises they heard and the shadows they saw. They are limited to only these observations. The people of the cave are only able to hear echoes from outside, and see shadows of people as a result of a fire behind the cave. They cannot turn their heads, so they can only see what’s right in front of them. Socrates describes to Glaucon a scene in which there are people chained by their arms and legs to the wall of a cave. In Book Seven of The Republic, Plato presents his famous “Allegory of the Cave”.
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